Predictive Analytics and False Positives

We are in the midst of an analytics boom. Everywhere I look, I see analytics presented as the answer to everything from sweaty pores to security. They may even improve hair growth. That aside, analytics truly are invading everything we do. There are three types of analytics. Over reliance on any one type leaves businesses …

Security Disaster Recovery Plan

In the last three virtualization and cloud security podcasts, Mike Foley, Sr Technical Marketing Architect for vSphere Security, mentioned security disaster recovery plans. There is a growing need for such plans. The 174th podcast covered this need, as well as the why and the how of putting such plans together. Unlike traditional disaster recovery, security disaster …

Cloud: The Great Disaggregated Everything

As I’ve thought about how to implement high-performance, very large-scale networks within a secure hybrid cloud, I have come to the conclusion that the cloud works best with disaggregated network functions. This is the goal of network function virtualization, or NFV, but the real problem is knowing what functions to virtualize and how to do …

Disaster Recovery as a Service Requirements

In our data protection research, we have discovered that there are quite a number of companies that say they do Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Just what is DRaaS? What are the basic requirements? Is using a public cloud better than using hosted DRaaS? Are there any risks? Is DRaaS just a dump-and-go? Is …

Encryption Secrets

There is a growing movement to encrypt everything. I prefer encrypting specific data, not everything. However, modern CPU chipset features have sped up encryption so much that encrypting everything is a valid option. Encryption requires one to have access to the keys or the related encryption secrets. Those secrets need to be at the fingertips …

IT: The Industry of Change

Nothing quite changes like IT. We have gone from incredibly manual, thought-requiring human processes to handling petabytes of data to make a single decision. In essence, our requirements have changed to meet our real-world needs, whether such change has been to improve performance, capacity, or other needs. Requirements rule the world of IT. Recently, we …